


A Creature Void of Form

by montparnasse



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-08
Updated: 2014-05-08
Packaged: 2018-01-24 01:30:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1586672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/montparnasse/pseuds/montparnasse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the growing of daughters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Creature Void of Form

**Author's Note:**

> This began as an attempt at some Mother's Day fic and spun out of control very quickly. Nonetheless, the sentiment stands: Happy (early, or late, depending on where in the great big world you may be) Mother's Day!
> 
> (Also, I know Morrigan's child is apparently canonically male but I just don't have it in me to give a flying whatsit.)

I.

Oh, but she loathes Amaranthine, chafes at its cobblestone and salt-slick air, lets a precious new rage swell up inside her like an apple seed catching in her throat at the sight of Vigil’s Keep, the scent of killing sulfur-sharp on the wind and the hollows of the earth. Alistair, Alistair, she knows, rose and steel and cedar bark; her stomach is empty, always it is empty, and she wants blood, wants _his_ blood just the same as she wants his mouth, his hands, her name on the withering flicker of his breath.

 _Alistair_ , she thinks, rolls the name like her own sweet, private curse. _Alistair, Alistair_ , violent and soft like. She wants to rip out his throat with her teeth. She wants to feel his face pressed into the crook of her shoulder, hands clenching tight on her back, wants to feel his body shift and change to accommodate _her_ , shelter _her_ , just as she did for him; she wants him and wants him, the electric jangle of their limbs, the sweet, slow race-and-melt, the smooth dissolve deep inside her, shocking through her and shuddering down to her toes.

Inside her, the cub kicks. Morrigan cracks open a pomegranate, lets the juice stain her fingers and runs them over the gentle slope of her belly like a blessing, vicious red slash in the light of the stars. She eats more and then more, the forest bursting forth to appease her, furious, voracious god with her terrible temper and her endless hunger. She could devour this whole forest, she thinks; she could devour it all and birth a new one, better and more terrifying than before, born of her blood and bone and agony, a kingdom of her own creation.

The air is thick with the smell of smoke, the knifblade of death following on its ragged heels. She can still smell him, his divine weakness, his feeble fury, wonders if he could ever sniff her out like this if he wanted, if he has tried. Morrigan wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, her hair hanging loose down past her shoulderblades, pomegranate juice between her breasts; the wind and the trees are telling her to run, the soft green syllables of spring spelling out her path from the welcoming fecundity of her forest. Down to her knees, then, on her palms, a shiver of starlight and inky blue instinct, and the forest floor quakes beneath the hips of the wolf, snarling, running, immaculate in her ancient, almighty violence.

 _My young one_ , she thinks, rough and love like. The cub lies still in her womb, tiny little miracle with a heart beating on its own. _My baby girl, my love. I will kill for you. I will burn for you._

The flat-edged moon pulls at them both, and she knows:  it will be soon, it will be too soon, and the hunger fills her again like hunting. For now, blood bound by blood, apple curled up tight in her womb, Morrigan runs with her cub, runs and runs until her hunger is sated, muscles in constant motion, the moon’s greedy fingers one step behind and always, reaching, clawing until her snout closes on the first russet light of dawn.

Early in the morning, a man steps into the mouth of the forest, feeling every inch an intruder. He stares at the crushed violets, the smattering of muddy tracks, and listens to the wind murmur in the trees, softly, softly.

—

Every year, when autumn spills out over the Brecilian Forest, Merrill sits in the aravel with a cup of apple tea while Marethari cuts her hair and sings. With each stroke of the scissors this year, Merrill, seventeen and full of vines and sweetness blooming in her bones, sits up straighter and feels for the first time more woman than girl; Marethari tells her their stories, always her favorites on these days, and as Merrill shakes the black strands out of her eyes, Marethari sweeps what she’s cut into a pile to leave for the birds, who take it in their beaks and fly off to their nests high up in the trees, where mothers will line their nests with down for their babies, insulation against the coming cold.

“You’re restless as a goat,” Marethari laughs. She is looking at Merrill with those fond eyes she loves so much, golden in the last light of the afternoon. “Come outside, da’len. We’re not done yet.”

“Oh. Are you going to shave it off? I do _like_ it, it’s just the right length for ear-warming,” she protests. The Keeper’s eyes crinkle with amusement, mossy and bright like river stones.

“No,” she says, gently. “Merrill. Come sit with me.”

Marethari sits across from her and presses a finger to her lips; when she takes Merrill’s wrist between her thumb and forefinger, when she waits for the thrum of her pulse there, Merrill _knows_ , and her eyes prickle with tears. She wants suddenly to reach for her, hold her, cry like a child, but she does not; she cannot.

When it’s over, her face is throbbing like a big overgrown heart with a nose and a mouth, and the Keeper hands her an old, cracked mirror; her jaw is set firm, and still she will not speak to Merrill, not until she has looked upon herself a woman now in the light of the dying sun. And this is her own blood, this is her own creation, this is what the Keeper has given her:  river-deep lines like honeysuckle vines, rose thorns and halla horns and the furled roots of a great, wise oak tree to crown her pale face, wreathed over her brows and eyes and written in her own sorrow, the flush of her love, and Merrill thinks, red and splotchy and swollen, that she is beautiful. She is _beautiful_.

“Oh, da’vhenan,” Marethari whispers, fierce and heavy. Her arms are stronger than anything Merrill has ever known or ever will, the borders between them blurred, Keeper and First, still so together and lost in it, their own world, their own love. “My beautiful girl. My Merrill.”

“Keeper,” she rasps, her mouth like cotton and the words all dried up, but the Keeper knows, smoothing her hands down Merrill’s hair. She _knows_. She has always. She will always. Merrill, bright blossom caught at once between the sun-warm grasp of childhood and her incipient womanhood, knows _this_ , the way the Keeper does not even need to question, the way she enfolds her so completely even when Merrill herself is bigger now. She could never live without it, the weight of the Keeper’s arms, their hands full of each other, the smell of her skin. It is ageless, nameless, limitless. It is the same as this particular color of blue in the sky, the sparkle of the setting sun. She wants to curl up in this womb forever, here with Marethari, just them and their forest, threaded with those things that have always stitched them together, apple tea and long black strands of hair and love and love and love.

After the sun bleeds into black, they watch the stars move across the sky all night, she and Marethari, and Merrill feels her eyes and lungs shockingly open as she traces out their tales and their fortunes, their fingers threaded together in the dark; Merrill is stronger for it, braver for Marethari’s dry knuckles, the lines of her palms. “Andruil is bright,” Merrill says, the knowledge bubbling out of her like flowing water. Above, the Huntress twinkles down at them, the tip of her arrow searing through their wide canvas of Ferelden sky; Merrill smells something wild on the breath of the wind, old and heavy, keen like wet bark. “A bad omen,” she finishes, and she feels Marethari’s hand squeezing her wrist, mindful of the place where the blood has caked, flaking off her skin in the dark.

Then, suddenly, the sky is an open wound; there will be blood, and soon, and Merrill knows this as she has known nothing before, knows it with every inch of herself that matters and feels the tight-throat threat of it unfurling in her chest, but Marethari does not let go of her hand. The Keeper hums one of her old tuneless songs and Merrill thumbs her knuckles, her eyes still on the very tip of Andruil’s arrow, mournful as winter rain, colder than silver. She can feel Marethari’s heart beating in her fingers, still humming her dead song like a premature burial, like the apotheosis of hand-me-down agony, and Merrill, wise woman, nightbird in the lifeless autumn night, stares down the scar of the red, red moon and refuses to look away.

—

Andraste, stone and marble and misery, la mère de tous les vivants et la mère de tous les morts. Leliana, seven years old and numb to her toes, huddles beneath her knees in the Chantry, taking short, stabbing breaths like kitchen knives and whispering the only word that means anything at all to a seven-year-old girl:  _Maman, maman, maman._

In all her stories, in every dusty-warm fairy book stacked up in her bedroom, this happens all the time. Mothers die and mothers leave and mothers, sometimes, lock their daughters away from the harshness of the world in high stone towers choked out by enchanted thorns; there, where no harm will befall them, where nothing will ever, ever hurt them, they can be their mother’s daughters forever, unbowed by the churning vortex of the years. It is this Leliana wishes for, desperately, religiously, her elbows digging into her thighs, the stone icy at her back. If only they had shut themselves away. If only she had known, if only she had made the right bargains, paid the right price the way the little girls in her books do, her mother might still be here. Si seulement, si seulement.

The healer, his mouth twisted off corkscrew-tight to one side, didn’t even look at her. _Désolé_ , he said, practiced and so very, very loud in her ears, and she fled when he closed her mother’s eyes, the tangled red halo of her hair burning in Leliana’s belly all the way to the Chantry. Her mother. Maman. Wild-eyed love of her life. Her exhausted beauty, her honey-sweet smile. Désolé.

And that is all that’s left. Sad mouths and slow words and funeral pyres.

“Que fais-tu?” Lady Cecilie, her hands folded between her knees, sits beside her on the marble and cocks her head to one side. Her eyes are ringed with sparkling violet, and Leliana thinks they look a little puffy. “What are you doing, child? Come, have some tea. I’ve got lemon tart, and you know I’ve got a bed for you to sleep in.”

“No.”

“No?” Even words are too much, too long, too much effort to process. Lady Cecilie seems to recoil from the sound of her own voice, resting her head against the cool marble, still as a ghost. “I wish you would, ma mignonne. I do.”

“I can’t. I can’t leave her,” Leliana gasps, a sudden flood of color and fear. Loss, she thinks, is so enormous, so bright and cold and far away. Marble eyes, unblinking. Everything misshapen, too big or too small or too close, everything out of tune, out of time. Easier to sit here. A comfort to stand still in the middle of the Chantry until it makes sense again, until someone tells her what to do.

“Oh, Leliana,” Lady Cecilie whispers, her shoulders sagging, her lips pressed tight. She looks like a woman in watercolor, pale pain bleeding into the corners of her eyes, her fragile bones, like she’s going to fade out at any moment. She is thirty-five, a child, and how is she supposed to know any better either, sitting here under Andraste because the stone is a relief to the unbearable softness outside, a dark lifeline in the bright, sun-bleached world that stings their eyes. “Leliana,” she chants like a prayer, “Leliana, Leliana, ma petite loutre. Ma malchanceuse.”

Leliana’s chest seizes up, mouth too heavy to move, to speak. Lady Cecilie’s arms around her are wiry and strong, her breathing uneven, and Leliana tries to push her away but she’s like granite and she doesn’t let go; she is suddenly everywhere, solid as iron, expansive as the air around her, and Leliana is crying into her green dress, crying and crying until her throat is raw and the grief wrings her out on the stone, beneath the merciful mother whose constant, thankless vigil will never end, can never end.

“There is room in me for you,” Lady Cecilie says, and her voice is rough but it never wavers, fierce as thunder and thinner than reeds, “and there will always be. We can pluck each other out of this, yes? Like oranges.”

And it is this, Leliana thinks, that she wants, that every girl and every woman must secretly want:  a mother big enough to hold it all, to sink into, strong enough and faithful enough to die for them, to kill for them, to cut away the fury and the misery and the chains and make them breathe again, fill their hearts with blood when they can’t do it for themselves. When Lady Cecilie pulls away, holding her at an elbow’s length, Leliana feels her lungs inflate with this miracle, with love like something holy, la belle reve, une chanson pour l'âme; they breathe, she and Lady Cecilie, for each other as much as for themselves. They swell with it, this blood-and-breath song of theirs, mournful as the new moon, as the autumn winds rolling through the valleys. Lady Cecilie carries her all the way home, sways with Leliana in her arms as if she is a baby and not a girl with heavy limbs growing fast in the sun, as if the added burden of her grief does not weigh her down. They are stronger and older than Andraste’s boundless eyes. They are split of the same earth. They are cut from the same soul.

—

 _Three days_ , the old woman said. _Three days, and you burn. Three days, and they fasten your noose. Three days, woman, and you swallow your own blood. Three days. You will live, but you must die first._

Midsummer is lily-time, omen-time, poison in the blood. Wynne sits on the lakeshore with a fig in her lap, digging her thumb into the pulp; she calls it her craving, tastes the mealy flesh on her tongue constantly, tears into them in the middle of the night while her feet pace the bedroom floor, beating the frantic rhythm out of her and into the stone. Something is buzzing behind her teeth, beside her, and it takes a moment before she realizes he is still there, his fists clenched into stones between his knees, and she knows he is entertaining elaborate fantasies, guiltily, ravenously; he does not speak them to her, does not dare, this man made of steel and flame and a thousand perfect memories of futures never to be. He makes her tired, his eyes, the armor clasped around his skin even in this heat.

“We can leave,” he tells her, as if she does not know, as if she did not know what he brought her here to say, “but it has to be tonight. Only what we can carry.”

“Where would we go?” He is such a child. He is such a child. She loves it and she hates it and, mostly, she resents it. “You’ve thought about this, I assume?”

“The Anderfels, or Orlais, Rivain, I just—somewhere else. They won’t even know our names.” His voice sounds exactly like she imagined it would, saying that, the sickly hope, the swift, earnest bloom of desperation. “We can make new ones if we need to. Just. We _can_.”

Wynne’s fingers are sticky with fig, sliding across her lips as she allows herself to think of it, the two of them and a baby and season after season of destitute seclusion, love until it ran out, happiness until they spent their last copper. Love and duty, love and duty. Don’t ever confuse love for duty or duty for trust or trust for warmth and acceptance and absolution. She wants to shove him against the wall, ask him what is wrong with him that he can even think these things, and she wants to apologize for nothing and take him on her bedroom floor and tell him he is the most beautiful thing in this world and she wants to scream, wants to scream and cry and rip things apart with her hands.

He’s looking at her when she finally remembers to speak, half-sick with worry and fear and that wild, boyish love that promises good harvests, tulips on the table, a home in the doorframe of his arms. Things they don’t understand, things they have never known how to do. He has never even seen a farm. _I have outgrown this_ , she thinks, but no:  _I have outgrown you_ , and it seals her fate like the alignment of her stars.

_I have outgrown you, and isn’t fair, and none of this is ever fair, and now we will have to suffer alone._

“A woman in Denerim told me I’m going to die tonight,” she confides, "in a manner of speaking.”

He startles, wild-eyed, and takes her hand. They don’t fit together right, her long, sticky fingers, his calloused palms. “Wynne,” he says, just her name. He takes a breath, and she wonders if he wants to invoke the pristine comfort of the Chant, the way so many of them would in the face of a woman’s superstition, or in Wynne’s own defiance. In the face of a woman’s knowledge. She wonders if he would have made her pay for it, the way men demand a woman pay for her womanhood, and a new sort of anguish shakes her as she looks at him, this man taught to fancy himself a shepherd lording over his cattle, who will act the part in time. “Please. We don’t need anything else, we don’t, I—I only want you. You know that.”

“I know,” she says, “but we’d not survive a year.”

“I don’t _care_! I—we don’t need anything, we don’t have to stay, we can’t. We can still do this, we can still have _more_ than this!”

“We can’t,” she tells him, because there was never anything else she could do. Not for herself. Not for the child breathing the air she gives it. “I can’t. I can’t.”

“No, no, we don’t! We _can_! _Fuck_ everyone else!”

But his mouth falters at the corners, sloe eyes clouded over. She reaches for him, her mouth dry, taking his jaw in her palms and running her thumb over his cheekbone over and over. Oh, but she loves him still, mercurial as summer storms; when she kisses him, she tastes fig and salt, fig and salt and steel, and she loves him, loves him, loves him, all the more in this moment for the way time will dull the thunderous heaving of her heart, all the more for the way this will dwindle, go dark, fade to a stale taste on the back of her tongue. This is love, and this is duty, and this is trust:  a bad omen, a chance you cannot take, a hundred unhappy endings scabbing over like fresh wounds in the midsummer air.

“We could have been lovely,” he whispers, one warm hand held firm against her own, a small, impoverished gesture. “We could have been lovely, you and me.”

“Yes,” Wynne says, her stomach hard and heavy with pain, the lilies and the leaves shuffling in the wind like walls, like great fortresses sinking down to nothing, "we could have been.”

—

The dog days of the Llomeryn summer stick between Isabela’s toes the way dried up sea salt and seaweed do, sweat sliding down her back and her forehead even in the damp cool of the open house late at night. There’s something almost cruel about it, she thinks, the stillness of it, the earth caught between spring’s verdant whispers and the hush of autumn; it offers nothing, brooks nothing, threadbare and strung out with the stretch of days, and so in its barren, malarial fury settles for trying to swallow itself whole and raw and writhing.

These are the days she remembers best, as she supposes most children do:  fishermen on the wharf, bare pink heels seeking the shadows on the baking-hot cobblestone, the smell of lavender on the wind, lemonade squeezed with her own fingers, when there’s sugar to spare and time for it. She does not remember the weight of another girl, or a boy. She does not remember lazy afternoons or the warm burst of the sea or the syrupy aftertaste of late-summer affection. She remembers little but brief, crisp images, the stillborn heat.

“There is a story,” her mother is saying, immovable as night, her breath hot at the back of Isabela’s neck, “about a woman with a thousand daughters.”

“Flemeth,” Isabela murmurs; she hates this story. Her mother yanks on her hair a little harder at the interruption, separating it out to braid. She has not done this since Isabela was very young, and she is both glad for it and a little frightened, so it’s not very much different from any other attention she receives from her mother.

“Flemeth,” her mother repeats. She doesn’t talk much—not to Isabela, at least, and she never has, preferring instead the company of incense and foolish travelers, but when she tells her stories, Isabela listens as if they are the only two people in the world; each one is precious, reverent in its horror. Her mother’s words are sparse and scattered as diamonds, and if she hoards them all between her ears it’s easier to pretend they are really for her, that she is the same as the girls in the market, the ones with mothers who grow peonies in their yards and mend their daughters’ stockings. “Flemeth, with her cruelty and her wilds and her thousand daughters. You know what the Chasind say about her, hmm, girl?”

“I don’t,” she says. This is new; Isabela sits up a little straighter as her mother begins to braid her hair with the gold ribbon that was part of her payment. It weighs as much as she imagines her wrist bones do, lighter than birds, feather-delicate and sorrowful.

“They say there was an old Chasind witch, withered and weathered with age, who visited Flemeth one day. By that time, the moon was full and Flemeth was grey and wrinkled, her eyes lightless hollows, but her daughter was as full of life and magic as the roots of a great tree, an endless well of a woman. She was beautiful, in all the ways her mother once had been; she was powerful, in all the ways her mother sharpened in her like a blade.”

She knows well the way this will go, the way it always goes, and she hates every iteration of it, all the excuses, all the pain; she wonders what her daughters did when they knew, if they ever tried to run when they realized these tiny seeds their mother nurtured were always meant to be ripped up whole just as they began to spread roots. Beside her is a basket of coins, full of gold and gems and things Isabela has never touched; she shifts a gilded tortoiseshell comb between her palms while her mother braids her hair with gold, the coolness of it a comfort, beauty meant to distract and hide like armor does. That heavy basket—the gold woven into her wild hair—is her worth, laid out before her like an offering, her weight in gold, her blood in silver coins.

“The woman asked, ‘Why could you not let her go? She has hardly begun to live. Show her mercy, for she is the blood of your heart, the fruit of your womb, and she is her own. Leave her.’ Flemeth, of course, didn’t take well to that.”

“And what did she do?” Isabela asks, knowing full well what Flemeth did, what Flemeth always does. Her beautiful, bright daughters, their flesh turned fruit, fed to the wolf beneath the full moon. She slips a gold ring on her finger and feels the cold, solid weight of it, the worth of her, silver-soft in her veins.

“She said, ‘And let her go, out in this world? Where she will suffer, where she will fade, where men will use her, where she will toil until she empties out and dies in bed, forgotten and alone? Rather that she would stay as she is now, that she would never grow a day older, that she would never know pain.’” Her mother turns her around to tie her hair with a leather string, gold on black on gold, suffocating, intoxicating gold. This is her. This is what she is _worth_. “And do you know what she did next?”

“No,” Isabela says, reaching for a heavy sapphire pendant, pressing it to her sweaty chest, right above her trapped-bird heart where her lungs exhale feverishly into the humid air. “Tell me.”

“Flemeth leapt from the shadows,” her mother says, her smile a knife licking into the hot skin of the dark, “‘What I do is kinder,’ she said, and she wept as she devoured her daughter.”

—

After the autumn fires, when the ruby-red warmth gives way to the colorless bite of winter, Eleanor Cousland begins to watch the sky. She sees the eyes of the watchman sear through the bull, the balance of justice swing a slow arc to vindication and then treason; when the mouth of the scorpion tears across the night sky, she straps a bow to her back and takes her daughter down into the valley, down to the riverbed where the moonlight drowns out the stars, and teaches her to hunt.

“There are other ways,” she says when Elissa loses the path and cannot find the tracks in the frozen mud. “You must learn to listen, and look. You must see the significance in things others would pass up.”

“Did your mother teach you?” Elissa asks her, bending her face toward a thatch of broken twigs. Already she reads the runes of the forest, her little girl, walking on the balls of her feet to learn the wild verbs of the hunt, her chest held tight with anticipatory breath. “Before you married Father.”

“She did. My mother and my sisters.” Her mother, because her father had disapproved as she knows Bryce will disapprove in that even-keeled way of his, as she knows the nobility will sneer and purse their lips, as if a knife does not befit a woman’s wrist as well as any gold. They will not declaw her daughter. If they will not stand beside her, they will learn to tremble beneath her. “This is where the bloodroot grows in the spring,” she says, coming into a grove of pine and cypress. She loves this, the opportunity to teach her daughter by chance rather than lecture, the primal art of it made whip-sharp and intimate here in the womb of the forest. “Feed it to your arrows, and it poisons to the bone.”

“Well! I hope I never _need_ to know that,” Elissa says, lifting her head to the glittering eyes of the serpent above. Eleanor knows she is enthralled by this, thrilled, secretly, by the quickening of her pulse and the quiet rush of her feet over hard ground. “I can’t imagine a worse way to die.”

“There are worse,” Eleanor tells her, “and I’ll not keep them from you.”

They share these nights between them like motions in stilted time, frozen and perfect and intimate, woven together with the rise of the stars and their seasons. Elissa learns to let the silence of the forest settle around her in thick black curtains, learns to hold herself taut as bated breath. She paints her blade with nightshade under the claws of the dragon; when the wolf gives way to the maiden, she brings down a giant stag and presents Eleanor the horns.

The years blur, peace breeding unease breeding contempt. Fergus marries; she is a grandmother; monsters roam the lands, unfettered and rebellious with the roar of their hunger; Rendon Howe’s son begins asking after her daughter, and she learns to tuck away her rancor when they speak of Elissa as if she is a mare to be saddled and displayed for roving lords and aristocratic pomp.

“He’d be good for her,” Bryce tells her one night, Arl Howe at his side, proud, haughty. “Good match. Beautiful children, of course, could be nothing else.” She knows Bryce looks forward to this, wishes for it, the union of blood and brother, so eager to give away what was never his, so eager for Eleanor to rejoice when her daughter is offered up at the altar like a lamb. She loves him so, and it is harder for her to bear because of it.

That same night, with the headsman hauling his axe high up in the early winter sky, Elissa walks into court with her gauntlets flecked with blood and a bearskin hanging from her shoulder, looking from the Arl’s ashen face to the servants’ wide eyes until at last she finds her mother, and Eleanor’s lungs swell fast and full with pride. “Look, Mother,” she laughs, and Eleanor pushes through the men to pull her close, “I’ll wrap you in furs all winter. I’ll fit it into armor for you.”

“My darling,” Eleanor says, grinning and jubilant as a child, as a mother, belly-ful, soul-ful, squeezing her daughter around the waist. “My pretty dove. I’ll make us a cocoon and we’ll sleep right on till spring. Just you and me till the ice melts, dearest, you’re all I need.”

She hears the sigh from her husband, imagines his frown, imagines Arl Howe’s strained smile, besieged by its own distemper. She imagines the beast reared back in all its might, her daughter with the ropes of muscles and tendons stretched strong through her arms, fluent in grace and glory and passion. Her daughter, apple of her womb, solid bundle of her flesh and blood and love. She wants to pick her up and lick her clean.

“Bryce’s little spitfire, indeed,” Howe laughs, and Eleanor does not correct him, does not have to imagine the smile slinking onto his lips, and he does not see the answer of her own, cannot, will not, monstrous and full of teeth, teeth, teeth.

—

A forest is a woman and a woman is a forest, and Morrigan has known this all her life as she has known nothing else, imparted by the fathomless potential of roots and vines and the sweet grasp of thorns and petunia petals, the cyclical ritual, build and rebuild and grow because it is your right and your dominion, seeds sown and fed with all the blood there is inside you. Rivers gouging paths through clay dense as iron, kingdoms of birdsong and fleshy blossoms of fruit. The threads of creation, thick cords like ivy blooming in chalky white bone, older and stronger than magic, more ancient than the measure of time, impenetrable and exultant.

 _Look well, little one_ , Morrigan says, wolf-mouth full of pomegranate seeds, full of yellow moon-eyes, _here is the nameless mother of your mothers whose blood flows in you still. Here is your cradle and here is the womb that bore you, and here you will sprout into life, and here we will revel like the gods, you and I, here we will harbor our rebellion within our own souls until the end of it all, until the days of ruin, until we fly away where they can never, never take us._

—

II.

It’s a little like a ship, Merrill thinks, the way the trees creak and sigh up here on the mountain. If she closes her eyes she can almost imagine she is on the sea again, the smell of salt bitter and brittle on her skin, the sway of fluid nothingness beneath. When she opens them, she is still here, the smell of pine sap still pricks at her nose, the eyes still narrow and look away. Her stars are all wrong, here on Sundermount.

This morning, treading the path up to the cypress grove, the orange dawn catches on the new scar shaved into her palm, pink as gums. A single red gladiolus sat in the ashes of last night’s fire; the wind comes from the north, crinkling into the crevices of the aravels with its frozen promises, whispering in her dreams. The earth stirs. Marethari is waiting.

“You greet the morning just like a songbird, da’len,” the Keeper says. In the early light, with her knees bent up to her chest, her eyes are the gold-green of a pond’s surface and creased with age and torment. “Come here. Let me look at you, my Merrill.”

Merrill lets the Keeper turn her face in her hands, feels her cold, thin fingers trace over her eyebrows, moving like worship over the branches and brambles she gave her First so long ago, as if she is trying to commit each undulation of her face to memory. This close, Merrill can see her throat bob with something that does not need to be spoken, the things she knows Marethari wants to say but won’t:  _How can you do this, you who pained me, you who bore down on me, I taught you better, tell me how to atone for us both and it will be done. We were meant to endure this together, you and I._

Every daughter must know it, Merrill thinks, that misery, the unbearable heaviness of shoulders and mouths. The way a mother burns. It is not fair for either of them. She will have enough of her own grief, in time, but love is such an irrational thing, making you think you can heft another’s burdens onto your back, making you willing to, wishing to.

“You will leave me today,” Marethari says, the barest of words. She has read the leaves, same as Merrill has; she folds her tight under her arm, where Merrill can feel her gulp down the chill air. “You will leave me for a ghost’s fate. For the bones of the dead.”

“I will leave you because I _must_.”

“Would that you had never gone into the forest that day,” Marethari mutters, and Merrill feels it more than she hears it, the shards of regret pushing up against her skin, that old, immortal pain. In the oldest stories, the ones obscured by the tides of time and history, it is not the spirit, not the _demon_ who seduces with the apple outstretched and red as a beating heart upon his palm; it is the woman, pretending passivity, spinning the poetry of her bargain, the woman who eats of his feast and tastes his blood in her mouth, the woman who weathers and wields her curse. They will believe there was a fall when Merrill was never pushed at all, never offered up her throat.

It is this that frightens Marethari most, the thought of Merrill and her bargain high up on the mountain, the price she pays in ripped up sheets of skin. Nothing is too much for this chance, this knowledge, not when her body is a vessel, not when her blood is a serviceable stream between past and present, wanting and having, emptiness and bounty. She would rewrite the geography of her own body until the blood seeped through her pores. The cartographer of her own flesh.

“You are certain,” the Keeper asks her, her arms like home, like love, unrelenting and ageless, “you are _certain_ this is what you want?”

“Yes,” Merrill says, mumbling into the fabric of Marethari’s cowl, the warm safety of her skin. “As sure as the birds and the leaves.”

When Marethari slips away from her, Merrill feels cold, naked, jelly-legged and unprepared for the world to which Marethari has just relinquished her, her only First, wide-eyed fawn taking her first steps on new, footsore heels. She feels purposeless without Marethari’s arms around her, without the shelter of her skin. It takes a moment to reorient herself in the sudden rush of the morning sun, and she realizes she does not know what to do.

“Merrill,” the Keeper is muttering, moaning, her voice breaking, urgent, “da’len, my beautiful girl. My Merrill. Don’t leave me, da’len, don’t leave me here alone.”

“I’m sorry, Keeper,” she whispers, falling to her knees, catching Marethari up in her arms, “I’m sorry, but I must.”

She is so small, like something newborn and afraid, sobbing into Merrill’s neck; here, between her own shuddering breaths and the pillow of pain in her stomach, Merrill rocks them back and forth, hums Marethari’s old, tuneless song into her hair and knows it as her own, marrow in her bones, all her agony, all her love, all her life, the old tongueless dialect melting iron-heavy in her throat like the thunderous drumming of her heart, like loss.

—

“C’était un cauchemar, Leliana, c’était un cauchemar. Je t’ai dit, le contexte est plus fort que le concept.”

Just after midnight, in Marjolaine’s room, and Leliana has let a target slip away, an incidental accomplice not much younger than herself with color high on her cheeks. She was brown-eyed and so _alive_ , a girl with a lifetime of mistakes left to make; it was not her fault, not really, and she didn’t need to be told to take the money and run when Leliana jerked her head toward the door. A good girl, clever fox with quick hands; in time, perhaps she will be like Leliana herself, lounging in a wide leather chair, sharpening her knife and drinking down her beautiful benefactor’s admonishment like milk and honey. It is a surprisingly attractive notion.

“She was inconsequential,” Leliana says, listening for Marjolaine’s snort, the derisive toss of her nose. Nothing is ever inconsequential, not for women like them, not here in le grand fête that is their lives, but Marjolaine’s purse is full of gold and their work is done, chaos left in their wake to slake their raw red thirst; the day is won, or so it goes. “Let her have her fun.”

Marjolaine’s eyes move up her blue shoes to the open neck of her gown, her gaze fixed somewhere between Leliana’s cheek and her mouth, something warm and inscrutable on her face. “Always you miss the small things, my lovely,” she says. Her fingers pull at the sleeve of Leliana’s red dress where it has pushed itself into the shape of something respectable, tugging it down off her shoulder again and then dancing away to the mirror across the room, though Leliana knows she doesn’t need to see the flush of her face to know how it bubbles across her skin. Marjolaine would know her in the dark, in death, by the glimmer of her breath, the song of her steps; Leliana could never hide from her. She would never want to.

Her knife long forgotten on the table, her eyes fall again on Marjolaine as she eases herself out of her blue gown, snagging on the generous swell of her breasts, the hair falling loose at the nape of her neck, her face abstracted in the silver mirror. Leliana loves her best like this, silk and softness, her smallest smile scratching at the corner of her mouth.

“Rude to stare, you know,” Marjolaine says, and Leliana startles, feels walled out again. “Didn’t your maman teach you anything?”

“Everything,” Leliana answers, grateful for an easy question. “I was lucky enough for two.”

“Mmm. Lucky girl, yes,” and if she didn’t know better she might think Marjolaine sounds a little bitter, an unfamiliar thing coming from the serrated, dazzling bundle of barbs that is Marjolaine. “Mine didn’t.”

“Where is she?” Her whole body strains toward Marjolaine, the arch of her spine, her hips. Yearns. “Your mother.”

“Dead,” bites Marjolaine, lets the word drop like lead and starts rolling off her stockings. “Bon débarras. Killed one of her men and died in prison like a rabid dog.”

“I’m—oh, Marjolaine, I’m sorry,” Leliana says, an earnestness uncoiling inside her that she cultivates like an endless spring in winter, something she could never burn away, not even for Marjolaine, whose shoulders give an odd jerk; then, she just shrugs.

She misses Lady Cecilie, misses the way her arms were big enough to fold her up even to her last, misses the way her eyes always found Leliana out, her cool hands, the smell of rose and bergamot, that old, powdery sweetness that was home and love and laughter; it is unfair, she thinks, that Marjolaine should never have known that, that she should know the teeth of grief and suffering before the intimacies of love. Something aches in Leliana’s stomach, behind her ribs, and Marjolaine, her net cast out between them, catches it and smiles.

“You like girls?” Her face has grown lean, _hungry_ , and almost, almost nervous. Leliana can see the even rise and fall of her chest, the way she cocks her hips like she’s wrapped in gold leaf and not her own skin.

“Do _you_?”

“Ah, my lovely, if you don’t know, you don’t like me well enough for this,” Marjolaine says, sitting down on the bed and crossing her ankles delicately; Leliana knows what she’s waiting for. The galvanization, magnetization. The tightrope rhythm of this game they play, the clink of her final piece falling into place; when Leliana bends over her on the bed and gently eases her down to kiss her mouth, her jaw, her neck right where the hot, sweet spill of her jugular pulses, she knows without a doubt what it is Marjolaine has just won.

Leliana opens for her, blooms out and uncurls to let her inside, twisting roots through her heart and lungs. There is nothing she cannot bear, for Marjolaine and for herself; Marjolaine makes a sound but Leliana swallows it, yanking her own dress down over her hips and pulling her closer, trapping a knee between her thighs, pressing down until she can feel their hearts welling up arrhythmic and loud against each other. This is love, and oh, _oh_ , this is all she knows:  skin and bared throats, bodies blurred like water into wine, a loud gush of flavor. This is love. This is love. Her muscles seems to expand and she feels malleable, fluid, as if she could encompass all that is Marjolaine and all that is her, her hands moving like a promise, like a river overflowing, sparked into sudden ignition as if she has been waiting and waiting for her chance. As if she was born already in love and ready for all of the pleasure and all of the pain.

“Je t'ai toujours aimée,” she whispers, reverent, fevered over Marjolaine’s navel, “always, always. I have always loved you. I must have.”

Marjolaine, naked and hot and narrow-eyed, thumbing Leliana’s cheekbones. “Why is it I believe you?” she asks, and all around Leliana the world explodes, breathes, holds.

—

On the first anniversary of her death, a child in Denerim gives her a poppy, and it is in this way that history repeats itself. Time spins in retrograde; she picks apart a fig with her fingers; the midsummer air sticks between her teeth; the wind tangles her hair; and then, every night for a week, in every inch of blackness untouched by the new moon, the stars fall and fall and fall.

“I mean, it’s just a _flower_ ,” Alistair is saying, sitting back on the heels of his hands. It makes him look very young. “Some little girl just thought you should have a, a, whatever that is. It doesn’t mean anything. You want flowers, I’ll pick you loads of flowers and you can ponder whether they mean apocalyptic catastrophe or really bad gas.”

Wynne doesn’t tell him what poppies are for, what day it was, the significance of a star careening down to earth through the heart of the lion; these are things she speaks with blood and iron and memory, and he does not understand, cannot, and he can’t help any of that. She tries not to be angry at him for it. “There is purpose in anything, if you know how to look,” she tells him, gently. Alistair just stares at the stars and does not see the sickle swing down into the head of the lamb.

Even here, even with thunder rattling in her lungs and a thirst like spilled blood, Wynne is a timeworn, tattered thing, dimmed mellow like paint. A living ghost, she thinks, and like a ghost she breeds regrets and fantasies and what-ifs, lets the vines slither up her throat in her dreams so she can taste what never was, slip free of the infinity of duty and responsibility she has heaped unto herself by the year. Everyone knows stories of ghosts, hauntings where mothers and children and lovers trail after the living in their sorrows. Wynne doesn’t understand why anyone would not welcome this.

 _I have lived long and well_ , she tells herself. _This is foolish. This is foolish. Stop it_.

And yet, and yet, what might you have had, what might you have been, what might you have grown in that old, hollowed-out wilderness inside you?

In the Fade she lets herself loose upon the blank fields of canvas, sculpting from immaculate clay and blood and the ancient resonance of her magic, remaking herself, remaking the entire world, vast, unburdened. A flock of swallows bursts forth from her throat, canopies of maple and hawthorn, a thousand blessed unrealities where she holds dominion, free of all shackles and all restraint. In one, she tends her forest with the claws of a dragon; in another, she leads her old apprentices to a tower of their own, high up on the sea, guarded by rocks and water-women with jaws wider than caves, free from flaming swords; an old one, a soft grey one, and she is a girl again, never pushed from her mother’s arms.

In another, and another, and another still, she wears a red dress and an apron, her fingers gritty with flour. In her favorite of these, she is baking bread at midmorning. There is a small cottage, here, at the end of a very old lane outside town. The table is dark oak, its surface scratched with a tiny lifetime of meals and games and evening teatimes. A garden with rhubarb and tomatoes. A bright blue rug by the fire. Children’s books and grand sweeping romances on the bookshelves. From the window she sees her husband coming up the lane with a yellow rose, armorless, weaponless, guiltless at last, young and beautiful just like her, he’s saying, _The rest of the day is ours, love, if you’ll have me_ , and his mouth tastes like blackberries, and her little boy is sitting at the table, laughing, and he looks so much like Alistair, and the violins swell up, and they fall into each other, drunk with joy—

It is foolish. It is foolish, but she can’t help that, either.

“It means remembrance, you know,” she says, suddenly, to Alistair, watches him startle beside her. “Consolation. A little like lilies, in that. The funeral flowers.”

“Are you—” Alistair stops, coughs, starts again, “I mean. Are you still _alive_ , do you think, or not?”

Wynne follows a tiny star at the flash of the horizon, a speck of sand in the sky waiting to blossom. “I think I am waiting for something,” she says, breathing in the oleander, feeling herself already on the precipice of a dream. “I’m sure you’ll know when I get there.”

Alistair never could fold himself away, his face stuck always into something innocent and unassuming, and he reaches out for her like a child, like a man, like a hungry thing unsure of how to navigate either the world or himself and thrust out into both alone and suffocating. “Don’t go,” he says, his palm pressed warm over her knuckles, a prayer older than words or tongues, just like she knew he would. “Please.”

Alistair never could read the stars, either, no matter how Wynne tried to teach him.

She is lovely, Wynne, and she knows it, beautiful nightbird with stars flashing in her grey hair, and if she could see herself now she wouldn’t know whether she is twenty-five or sixty-five; time echoes and crumples, spirals like a nautilus, memory begetting memory, regret begetting bliss. She is lovely, this living ghost, she was always lovely, and if each woman makes her own heaven, she’ll give herself a head start. She will craft entire worlds out of light, stitch oceans from flesh and bone. Omen for omen, year for year; she will remake time. She will sow her own stars.

“You don’t have to leave,” Alistair says, hardly a whisper. “You could just stay here forever. We’re almost a family, right?”

“Yes,” Wynne says, the words reverberating, the dream rushing in, flooding through her, breathing in, “we could have been.”

—

Sometimes, in the dizzy thicket of battle, the blunt jaw of a sword will catch her arm or an ankle and then, there, with the salt-steel tang of blood sharp in her nose, images will play behind her eyes in quick succession; after that, their matching memories come hurdling back in a sudden, exquisite rush not unlike orgasm. It’s hilarious, Isabela thinks, if not fitting that the pain should wrench it out of her.

Today, it was a broadsword and the smell of fish stew and then, frenzied and red, her mother’s fury when someone refused payment, two small porcelain bowls shattered on the warped wood floor. Darktown was too far and Anders too sullen-stormy, so she wound around the crowds of Hightown—bleeding all the while—and made her way to Hawke’s, where Leandra found her oozing on the stone and took her upstairs to the washroom at once, and there she is sitting still, eyes darting toward the door, unsure of how to speak, unsure of how to _be_.

“It’s not as deep as I was afraid,” Leandra says, and Isabela winces even though her hands are cool and kind. “You weren’t _alone_ , were you?”

“Yes, but I wasn’t quite expecting—well, you know,” she says, making a vague gesture with the arm that’s not dripping. “It’s all right, really. I’ve had worse.”

Leandra clicks her tongue and grabs something out of the side table drawer, dabs it onto the gash in Isabela’s arm. Willow bark and lavender, a mother’s magic. “I know it’s useless to worry, but it’s never stopped me before,” she says, and Isabela imagines her with Hawke, all stony-faced resistance in the face of grown women who were once their mother’s babies, wrapping gauze around her arm like she’s done it a thousand times before, which—well, yes. “Our door is open for you. Always.”

She doesn’t know what to say to that, because why would she, because she learned young how to set and nurture her own wounds because no one else will do it for you and the only reason she’s even here now is because she can’t do it one-handed. A part of her is jealous, that she never knew this, that she never had Leandra Hawke to suffuse the spaces that needed filling; she shrugs and fingers her earring, warm gold on warmer skin, something tangible and valuable, solid metal keepsake of her soul.

The bandage tightens, tightens, the pain numbed by Leandra’s dry, brilliant hands, and Isabela sighs, not even minding the loss of her gold bangle. _I could kiss you on the mouth,_ she thinks, which is an entirely inappropriate thing to say to your lover’s mother, who cannot be approached with gin and toothy platitudes. “Thank you,” she says instead, all sheepish angles.

“Darling, you’ve nothing to thank me for,” Leandra smiles, “I used to do it all the time for my girls. But—I wonder, if you might do me a small favor?”

“You know I am falser than vows made in wine,” she laughs, and to her surprise Leandra does, too. “But anything, for one of you Hawkes.”

“Stay with me, a while. It’s rather quiet here, this afternoon, and I do love company who knows their Ferelden playwrights.” Her hand is pressing into Isabela’s arm, insistent, soft. Isabela wants to lean into her. “You’re practically family, but I never do get to see you, much less away from my daughter. She’s a little like a barnacle at that.”

“I’m not much for company,” she says, ignoring the bit about family and the way it makes her stomach seize up, makes her little-girl-lost eyes sink back into her skull. It will be awkward if she stays, the way it always is when she doesn’t know how to be easy, and she’ll sit there with a smile so shabby her temples ache, unsure of what shapes her mouth is making or how to move her limbs. Claws and quills make for poor friends. Plaster enough gold on them and you might hide them, might at least not have to wear your ugliness, but it is still there and it still tears at your throat when anyone gets too close.

“Piffle. Come, have some tea and biscuits, I’ve got all sorts,” says Leandra, stern as a mother, and then Isabela is being steered into the library, where there are books and big chairs and tea with honey. She sinks back into her chair while Leandra surveys the shelves, searching for something to give to Isabela, chattering like a morning sparrow; she butters herself a second crumpet and, remarkably, does not taste fish stew or porcelain shards.

She imagines Leandra, young and bright, reading to her children, knitting their winter stockings, holding their hair back when they were sick. When they were older, treading that shallow water between childhood and adulthood, she was probably the sort of mother who made sure they weren’t out getting pissed or seeing people naked; the thought makes her smile into a bite of crumpet. A mother who didn’t shatter her own children, who knew how to love them. Some of the tenseness seeps out of her shoulders.

“Did you read to your children?” Her voice sounds so strange like this, wistful and unpracticed in this language she does not speak. If her hands weren’t full of tea and crumpet, she would be reaching for the solid firmness of her necklace.

“Until they told me they were too old for it,” says Leandra, pulling out something red and embossed with gold. “Marian had me do all the noises of the forest animals until she was thirteen,” she tells Isabela in a conspiratorial whisper, a small, secret smile, and Isabela laughs, thinking she might like to be here for the row when Hawke finds out her mother has been revealing the murkier bits of her childhood. “I would still, you know. If they wanted me to.”

There is something so plaintive, so soft in her face that Isabela suddenly wants to curl up with her, wants to know what it was like to flourish under her hands, wants, violently, to protect her, to make her happy the way a daughter should. She doesn’t know what to do with that, either, so she shoves more crumpet into her mouth and looks up when Leandra presses the book into her hands, smiling, saying, “I think you’ll like this one. We’ll start our own reading circle, us. Who needs those fancy clubs when you’ve got _our_ invaluable insight, and crumpets, even.”

It is a book of fairy tales, the very sort every girl wants and Isabela never had, old, dusty and sweet as harmony. For a moment, as they sit quietly together, all there is in the world is the soft leather slip of the book against her palms, the smell of tea and ash from the fire; there is nothing but Isabela, and Leandra, and the flutter of pages, and this little sliver of a moment, warm and raw and all theirs.

Isabela’s throat feels hoarse and misused; she tries, anyway. “Will you read one to me?”

“Oh, darling,” says Leandra, softly, her eyes large and moon-bright in the fire, “of course I will.”

When Leandra reads to her with her throat full of princesses and spindles and a million, million stairs, Isabela breathes her voice like a baby, the whole wide world shut out around them. She remembers the smell of freshly turned earth, wet sand between her toes. Laughter like a charm in the shock of the sun and the belly-thrill of waves. She remembers the creak of floorboards, eyes as beautiful and unsettling as the hundred-year storms, blossoming dark just for her, and then the slow, sudden crush of love that creased itself into her chest, how it unfolded one afternoon while she was eating peaches at the docks. Leandra reads, and Isabela, her body curled into the words and the insignificant world shut out, smiles as the memories wane, dim, and melt into her bones.

—

The night comes to Eleanor in pieces. There are the bells, frenzied and irrevocable, ringing out from somewhere; the cold clasp of her armor; Oriana and Oren lying face-down on the soaked red rug; and the stars, the stars, oh, the livid golden stars, the teeth of the serpent biting through the smoke, snarling, bellowing for death.

In the end, her daughter is the only thing that keeps her standing.

They hunt the men down like game as they come, but there are so many, multiplying, frothing, clamoring for blood, beasts in the walls and the grass and hiding in the beds. Her arms burn with the coarse ache of overwork, and by the time they reach Bryce, they are both panting and frantic with the singular urge to move and _move_ until their bodies give out because it is all the purpose they have anymore, but in the hazy chaos Eleanor sees that her husband is half-dead already, and the Grey Warden is waiting, and it dawns on Eleanor in cold nausea and sunrise:  _I am going to die here_.

Elissa clings to her, neck pressed against Eleanor’s cheek where she can feel the pulse of her heart, a rapid drum-song of promises Eleanor will never see. A torment.

Duncan is saying something, trying to pull her away, but Elissa won’t go, won’t dissever herself from her mother, and Eleanor wants to tear herself apart, wants to carry her daughter out of here on her back, her baby girl, her dark-eyed love. They were not meant to be apart.

“My dearest,” she says, her hands in Elissa’s hair, tender as benediction, “my pretty dove. Go. You must go.”

“No,” Elissa groans, a cracked, broken thing. Her breaths come in great, heaving gasps, and Eleanor wants to breathe for her like she once did, wants to wrap her up and bleed for her. “No. No.”

Eleanor remembers the day she was born, how she cried when they finally let her hold her baby because she was so soft and beautiful and what a miracle she was, that she had grown inside her, little thing with her tiny face pinched up, her hands reaching already for Eleanor. They had cried together, and it was only ever the two of them and it would only ever be, so warm and in love. She loved her daughter with a violence only a mother knows, with all her fury against the sharpness of the world, insatiably, terrifyingly. She holds her close now, as she has always done, so in love; the world is ending, and Eleanor is still so in love.

“Go. Now, Elissa,” she whispers, her skin prickling numb and burning, “you must,” and, “leave me, my little girl,” and, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

“There’s no _time_ ,” Duncan says, his voice tinged with anger, and Eleanor wants to scream at him, wants to roar until he cowers in penance at his interruption, wants to rip out his heart and eat it raw, but that isn’t fair, either. It’s not his fault, not even when he is dragging Elissa away from her, not even when she can no longer feel her daughter’s warmth against her aching hands, her voice ravaged and dying in her throat.

“Mother,” Elissa, crying, still reaching for her, and Eleanor knows she wants to fight Duncan away but then she would have to stop looking at her. “Mother. Mummy, Mummy, _no_.”

She will grow to be a woman without her mother; Eleanor stands with her fingers on her bow, on her death sentence, on the price of her love, and keeps vigil over her husband’s body until her blood sings and soars in her ears.

Eleanor Cousland knows, with every bit of herself that ever was, that her daughter is going to live. Her daughter will become a woman, wild and proud, conqueror of her own fate. She will rip the earth beneath her feet; she will revel, and she will burn for it, and she will endure, miraculous and unshackled, and it will fill her veins like sanctification, and she knows it like she knows the movements of the stars:  her daughter is going to live. Her daughter is going to live.

The doors shudder and Eleanor’s heart lurches with them, the blood surging back into her limbs; her daughter is going to live. Her mouth splits, vicious inhuman grin gleaming with wolf-teeth, and she waits, listens for the sound of the axe on the lock. She breathes, her feet rooted into the wood, immovable monolith staring down her ruin as the pounding splinters the doors open. Her eyes wide, laughing, laughing; the arrow, a bright hard thundercrush between the ribs; the flood; and then the city rushing in, the walls crumbling down like pages, filling her lungs with words and blood, words and love, like the howl of an angry god.

—

After it all, after hours and hours of cursing, wailing, thrashing, after all the dull white agony spent tearing at tree roots and dormant lily bulbs, Morrigan finally touches her baby, her daughter, her tiny nine-month-old pomegranate, and at once feels a great ferocity swell through her at the thought of loving her, teaching her, sheltering her. It still hurts and there is still sweat running down her temples but Morrigan thrills at it all, the pain, the soft bundle wriggling in her arms.

She is going to be a good mother. She knows this violently, wonderfully:  She is going to be a good mother.

“My little one,” she whispers, her voice toil-torn over the baby’s cries, “my little girl. I would die for you.”

Morrigan traces the wrinkles in her daughter’s face and arms and legs, marveling at her smooth pink skin, her thick baby-fingers, the feet that fit neatly into her palms. Here is her nose, her knifepoint chin, her same black hair, wispy and feather-fine, and here, too, are eyes too dark to be entirely hers, threaded with amber and deep-set. She cannot believe she grew this child inside her, blood and breath made flesh and voice, fingers and toes, the hands that are reaching for her, that know her the way only a baby knows her mother, craving her warmth and her comfort the same way Morrigan suddenly craves hers.

The moon presses in on them between the trees, brimming full with light, and Morrigan, exhausted in her bones and replete with a fresh torrent of joy, lets it kiss her daughter’s face like ritual, still so new and raw and beautiful. She presses their noses together and wonders at it, her skin hot against her daughter’s skin, her heart beating like a little bird in her chest; Morrigan, the world’s longest living sacrifice, woman of many more years, victor of fate and destiny, and the tiny speck of eternity in her arms. Warm and wet and aching and still so together, inseparable as ink into water, and they are perfect.

She can taste the beasts in the air with honeysuckle and crabgrass, but they know to stay away from the wolf and her cub, and Morrigan revels in the thought of protecting her as she nestles her baby against her breast to feed her, mouth right above her beating heart. The moon slams into her eyes when she looks up, floods her through with wicked yellow-white eyes like the euphoria spilling out inside her, like violence, pouring onto her daughter’s head in a soft, glimmering circle.

Her daughter will have everything Morrigan never did. She will have her bedtime stories and her name day cake, she will have winter scarves and summer rain. She will have all those glittering, golden things Morrigan was never allowed; she will have the names of the stars, the taste of fruit, the embrace of the earth, all those things that are best and brightest in the world, just the same as she will have her mother’s jaws and her mother’s arms, her mother’s love like a flame she can shape with her hands. Looking down at her daughter clutched to her breast, Morrigan exults; there is nothing she could ever love more than her tiny little cub, nothing more worthy than this small seed she nurtured and grew inside her, who she will feed and shelter always in all the softest spaces of her body. There is no measure of blood she would not spill. There is no agony she could not endure.

Morrigan laughs softly, brushes a kiss to her daughter’s fontanel. “My little one, my baby,” she says, the scores of maple trees creaking gently, slowly. “You will grow to be a wolf, just like your mother,” she whispers. The forest breathes; her voice is a thousand years old, saying, “And how I love you, how I will love you.”

The wind shivers in the trees and the branches shatter the bone-white moon. A nightbird crows, and the leaves fall, scratch against the loamy earth, prepare the ground for spring and sprouts, spilling themselves like a blessing. The forest breathes in, and Morrigan breathes out. On the floor, planted at the heart of a sugar maple, she lies with her daughter as the moon slips behind a cloud, and here, mother and daughter and ancient sprawling forest close their eyes; here, in her rightful dominion, in her own ancient kingdom, Morrigan unfurls, and sleeps.


End file.
